antin david real estate

8/11/2019 Antin David Real Estate

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David ntin [ 932]

RE L EST TE

while i believe that what im doing depends essentially uponthe event here going here coming here and making

what my idea of what a poem is or making my idea ofwhat a valuable talk is if thats what poetry is there is a

life problem a kind of running down of ones life 1 maynot be facing it very gravely now although when i cameto california i started running on the beaches they have

beaches and you can run on them and i twisted an anklewhile running on the beach and it took a damned long

time for my ankle to heal and having played football andbaseball at various times in my childhood i always healed very

quickly and this was the damnably longest healing that ever

happened to me and i had an image of myself as a 4 yearold pitcher which is not an easy thing to be forty year old

pitchers have to watch where they put their feet and watchhow they move and be careful that the mound is the right height

because if they step off too fast they can lose it all that yearand it was then i realized that life is running out somehowi didnt feel grave about it but somehow i had to be careful

where i put my foot and id never had to be careful where i putmy foot before see up to then i could just put my foot downand if it slammed against the pavement it didnt matter much

if there was some pain it would be over the next minute or dayand if i got knocked down by something i could get up again

Sgo

from Tuning (1984)

from Douglas Messerli, From the Other Side of the Century


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but i was beginning to realize that as with a car thereis a limit on how long it can do it

and so i had the feeling that

in these pieces where i go out and talk its true that i regardthe pieces s the center yet i still feel that because itsrunning ou t and i dont have time to go all over to do the

pieces all over the world im not omnipresent in all placestalking to all the people i feel might benefit from hearing me

talk or that i might want to talk to because i enjoy theidea of talking to people i suppose i thought ill put these

things in booksbooks are not ideal i dont believe that books

are ideal forms that is books are imperfect recordingsof transactions tha t occur in real time im here now and im

trying to make a piece the way artists have probablyalways tried to make real work once and at some point

ill take an imperfect record of what ive done and it willbe an imperfect record because it will only be a tape recording

and it will only get some of the effect of being here becausewhat i say to some degree is determined by what you

think and my sense of it otherwise id have to do anentirely separate berkeleyian ego trip where i wouldtalk about anything independently of who i think you are

this is not myapproach to poetry i suspect that the approach to poetry

of poets in their natural habitat which is inperformance and in performance improvisation hasalways been a response to some specific set of urgencies

that is homer told the story that w y that time wehave only two of those tellings reworked several timesprobably but we only have two of them and who knows

why he decided to tell us about odysseuses son telemachusfor some reason something tripped him out on telemachus

while he was taking up odysseuses return that day atthat place maybe he was at a place where it was important

that he should talk about the island where telemachus went toget advice from an old man maybe some relative of the old

man was in the audience someone who was in the familyline maybe somebodys son was there and his father

was gone and homer knew it there is no reason to


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suppose that these performances were staged so that therecould be comparative literature 134 in which you take up

the odyssey and the iliad as the two great surviving works of

all timeits hard to believe that the poet performer was looking

forward to an infinite posterity preparing you to worryabout a greek aristocracy that had long since vanished it

seems unlikely it seems more likely that he had somethingto say and that the stories were familiar but the way he told

them was dependent on some set of accidents like there beingthese people here and

still there is the book homer

need have had no respect for books i doubt if homer wouldhave cared about ever being translated by robert fitzgerald say

and i think robert fitzgerald knows that too i would byno means want to suggest tha t robert fitzgerald is under any

illusions that he was doing something for homer i dontthink that homer would have cared but we now feel acertain anxiety about being locked in being in a small

room as it were without telling someone outside the room

what the room was like maybe because its valuable to knowwhat its like in this small room maybe something happenedvaluably in this small room

i dont believe in globalism mnot a globalist which is why i dont speak with a rhodesscholar accent or part of the reason in my university

there are many people who have strange accents that whenim stuck with committee meetings i normally try to analyse

phonemically and they have very strange phonetic structuresbecause they were exchange students somewhere in england

once and i recognize iowa under cambridge and i keep sayingthat sounds like iowa but then it sounds like cambridge

and then it sounds like a fantasy of cambridge and i cantquite get it and then theres a little bit of la jolla mixed in itbecomes an interesting task to dissociate the parts of this accent

that are a consequence of a belief in some kind of globallyappropriate style

now the book itself can be considered apackage a kind of care package so to speak right i meani do my talking here and i take my imperfect recording and i


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tr nscribe it in the hope of finding wh t in it w s the re l thingthe re l ction nd i try to get it into the book in such

w y th t its still intelligible when it goes into this rect ngul r

object with covers th t you open like this nd whichis p rtitioned rbitr rily by those things they c ll p gesthere re

no p ges when i t lk you dont turn nything t ll th tis i turn you turn but we dont turn p ges someone

doesnt bring down screen in front of me every few minutesnd then let me continue g in

now the book h s thisproblem but then everything h s its problem t lking lso

h s its inherent difficulties there is no such thing sperfect medium th ts why they c ll it medium bec use

its in the middle so to spe k its between it medi testr ns ction nd deflects it

you st rt out to re ch for somethingth ts under w ter nd your h nd goes to the wrong pl ce

nd fter while you re lize th t the object under thew ter is differently situ ted th n you would h ve im gined

it to be i f it were outside the w ter nd under the ir let uss y bec use w ter h s different rel tion to light r ys

th n ir which you dont re lly think bout nd re goodt re ching through bec use th ts wh t youre lmost lw ysseeing nd re ching through so th t under ir you lmost

lw ys find it bec use th ts the w y you le rned bout seeingnd re ching where s under w ter its re lly not where you

think it is bec use th ts where it would be under ir ndits re lly not there but then you re ch g in nd find it

fter number of trys nd you re lize th t the w ter ismedium s the ir is medium nd the lens of your eye is

medium well l ngu ge is lso medium th t were t lkingthrough

nd m ybe there isnt nything but the l ngu ge whenwe think fin lly but theres some sense in which we

feel ourselves moving tow rd the l ngu ge tow rd thel ngu ge to go through the l ngu ge nd the l ngu ge h s

its h bits its specific density its index of refr ction nd ic n use the h bits of the l ngu ge i f i know wh t im doing with

them nd sometimes i get used to them nd i get very


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expert and i forget theres going to be a crack in the grainsomewhere over there and im going to get stuck with something

something i dont want because it is the habit of

the language to divide the world that way in that zoneand its not my inclination to divide the world in quite

that w y and then ive got troublepoets have always had

trouble with language anyone who uses it seriously hastrouble with it it goes the way it wants to go because

of the w y people took it before and im a foreigner in ityoure a foreigner in it do you realize its the one thing

we all are is that were ll foreigners in the language youknow its very funny to talk about acquisitions of secondary languages

because nobody comes in speaking the languageyou come into

the world not speaking it and its their languageand theyve spoken it and you havent spoken anything

youve been involved in looking in feeling andtouching in transactions with them and all the

while they keep talking this foreign language

and graduallyyou take it from them and you get to think of it

what you get to think of it you may be suspicious ofthe way they use language maybe you think that theyre sayingstrange things that you dont agree with but in order to

get them to do nice things to behave reasonably youpretend to accept their language and after a while youve

accepted enough of it to be called a native speaker whichis itself a lie of the language in a real sense there is something

of a lie in this there is no such thing s a native speakernative would

suggest that there is such a thing s someone who w s bornspeaking it there is no such person who w s born speaking

it we are ll born foreigners and its very important toremember that were all foreigners and ll languages are secondary

to our beingbecause before that there were meaningful

transactions and we all got involved in them i dont knowwhat it is to be before the language but what i know now

is that the term 'native speaker has come to seem alien


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to me again because native doesnt seem to go with speakerit seems to be an odd juxtaposition of two terms that

are somewhat at odds with each other an exaggeration of asort an over opttmtsttc one that promotes a false

union that somehow because we are all here now and seem tobe at home here and seem to have been at home here s

long s we can remember speaking a common language thatwe ll understand it would seem s though we were born

here speaking one language and we ll share a native currencycould you imagine

having a native currency coming into the country withits money being born with a supply of its money ts tt

really that different to be born with dollar bills in yourpockets and thats not trivial you dont have pockets and you

dont have dollar bills in them look take a dollar billsee it doesnt mean very much at this point but its

wonderfully formalized the dollar bill has all the great marksof our unity gathered together on it

it has the numeral oneprinted in all four corners and on both sides it has the

founding fatherof

our country in the centerof

it our firstpresident number one and on the other side the reverseside his place is taken by the word O N E which in case

you are in any doubt about it is also printed over each of thenumeral ones in the four corners of that same side and it is

wonderful in its promise of a beginning a new order ofcenturies from out of the many one beginning with one

and it is all very wonderful s it states unequivocallythat this is legal tender for all debts public and private and

you may believe this i used to believe it tooi used to

believe it too i w s an artist in residence at notredame i kept thinking ill be an artist in residence and ill be

talking to the football team which w s kind of nostalgicfor me but i got there and they had me in this funny motel

notre dame has a great motel theyre terrific on motelsbecause all the tractor salesmen from duluth come down on saturday

to watch the football games so they make a lot of moneyon the motel and i w s in the motel and i thought well

what i ought to do is rent a car because on the weekendi f you dont want to go to the ballgame which i didnt


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really you might want to go see some other part of the countryand i came provided with a fair supply of dollar bills and

i went to the car rental agency o j simpsons company?

it was oneof

those companies the one in whose commercialsthis guy goes running to a car and makes a mad leap to getinto it because he has no time for formalities for some reason

or other o.j. simpson the man with the heisman trophyout there in the hall goes running to this car but presumably

he doesnt go there waving dollar bills because if he went therewaving dollar bills they would have said go away o j doesnt

wave dollar bills he waves credit cards i found out veryfast that i could wave all the dollar bills i wanted to they

wouldnt rent me the carbut it says here and i read it to

them i took my dollar bill out of my pocket and i read i tookthis dollar and read this note is legal tender for all debts

public and private i said how much do you want? illrent your car ill pay you in advance ill give you a deposit

they said havent you got a credit card from some majorcompany i said not only do i have a credit card from a

major company i have a credit card from the most majorcompany in the united states the united states becausebasically thats what this country is its a credit card company

its a credit card company and these are its credit cardsthey said

no we dont accept those i said you must beunamerican i said this is the biggest credit card company in

the united states because it is the united states it prints all thismoney they said we dont take it

so all week long i couldntget away from notre dame except when driven by friendly

students but i had no way of moving out on my own becausethey didnt accept dollar bills which as i understood it were

legal tender but they were not legal tender as far as car rentalcompanies went they would not accept payment they

would not accept deposits they didnt accept these green thingsand i said to

myself all these years i used to think this was money and ihad an image of money you know i didnt think a lot


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about money i confess s a kid i didnt really thinkmuch about money at all but money was a kind of solid to me

when i w s a kid because well because of the w y itspresented you know some of its even very pretty weused to have nickels that had the head of a very beautiful indian

on one side and a buffalo on the other these two vanishingspecies and they both looked wonderful and i used to

look with admiration at my nickel i really liked my nickelsi was a little kid jefferson on this one doesnt really

look very good but i dont have any buffalo nickels leftif you do theyre probably worth more than nickels which

goes to show you that if money is worth a lot of money it

goes out of circulation which i believe is called greshamsl w that cheap money drives expensive money out of

existence the l w meaning that whats cheesy stays inexistence and whats not cheesy you pull away from transactions

because you dont want to give it upand i liked nickels

i really did not only because of what they could buyi thought the nickels were really very nice i had a jar

of buffalo nickels the different years of buffalo nickelsthey went on for a while and i think they pulled them out ofcirculation some time after the second world war buffalo

nickels vanished and buffalo nickels and indian head nickelsbecame extinct and only were kept in peoples private collections

but these nickelswere very tangible to me if you took a nickel down to a

grocery store you could buy two coconut covered marshmallowcandies if thats what you liked and at tha t point i did if

you took one nickel to the candy store you could trade it fora spaldeen rubber ball with which you could play stickball

which was very nice because we played a lot of stickballand the spaldeen was considered a very good ball spaldeen

was the name of the ball or we used to call them spaldeensthough now that i think of it they were probably spaldingsbut in our neighborhood and in our dialect we called

them spaldeens and these spaldeens were very much

admired because they were much livelier than other balls andwe used to test them out by dropping them from about shoulder

height to make sure that they would bounce chest high or at


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least over your waist because if it only bounced knee high itwas a dead one and then nobody would be able to hit a home

run and youd wind up with a kind of pitchers duel eventhough you had no pitchers when you played stickball because

stickball s we played it in the streets of new york was playedwith a stick and a ball and the stick was an old broom stick what

you used to do was s w off the end of a broom though i nevers w anybody s w one off everybody always seemed to have one

really they always had these sticks and nobody ever sawedthem off at all somehow they grew sawed off and we

used to go into the street with our stick and our spaldeenand play stickball which was a game like baseball except

that you threw the ball up in the air and you hit it on the firstbounce which is why you used to be concerned for the ball

not to be dead and usually you stood with your stick at homeplate which was one of those sewer lids actually entrances

to the gas and electrical lines that ran under the citys streetsand placed at about 3 yard intervals so you had the batter

standing over one sewer lid that w s home plate and youplayed with first second and third basemen no shortstop

because the streets were so narrow and usually one or twooutfielders and in order to give the outfielders room becausethe streets in brooklyn were so narrow you usually playedup near the end of the street with second base the sewer lidnearest the end of the street so that the outfield could play

in the T of the intersection and you used to count sewerlids to describe the quality of your hitters and i f you

were a two sewer hitter you were really very good becauseyou could hi t the ball on the fly across cortelyou road whichwas the name of the broad avenue that intersected with east

fourth street where we played and if you were a twosewer hitter you could hit it over the head of the one or

two outfielders who patrolled cortelyou road and i f you werelucky it would sail over their heads and i f they were lucky

they didnt get hit by the bus that traveled up and down theavenue you had to be very alert s an outfielder because

you had to field the ball between the buses because

cortelyou road was a fairly heavily traveled street even in thedays before the smog hit because it was a big street that took

you down to the major local shopping area on flatbush avenue


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the others were very narrow little streets and cars came aboutevery half hour so you didnt have to worry about them

and thats what i used to think was the average rate for cars to

come through places about once a half hour you wouldsee a car and you got through a lot of innings and

when a car would come everybodyd walk to the side of thestreet and the car would sort of drift through at about

ten miles an hour and youd go back to playing stickballnow in those

days i thought of money s real because the prices of thingswere constant in my experience they were fairly constant

anyway little houten chocolate bars were two centscoconut covered marshmallows were about that price

were a nickel spaldeens were a nickel tops were a nickelmay begin to sound like a nostalgia trip but you see

yoyosthis

everything in my world it was a childs world w s fairlystable the price structure was stabilized and these

things that you wanted and used were all objects and thesethings that were money were objects too a nickel a yoyo

a spaldeen five pennies two marshmallow candies

one top two houten bars and you could trade them foreach other in regular exchanges five pennies for a nickel

or a top or a spaldeen the same w y you could trade the spaldeenfor a yoyo or a top or two marshmallow candies or a coke or a

big puree shooter and it was clear this was moneynowmmy

family there were people who probably didnt think that wayabout money they must have assumed that money was a

unit in a capacity to build something that would end up bymaking more of itself they call tha t capital but never

mind about that there is a threshold effect in piling upmoney you pile up enough of it to become contagiousyou eventually get together a lot of nickels and eventually they

start reproducing themselves at a certain pointi had no such

experience of money and no such theory of money s anagent of infectious disease and i only knew money s a set of

simple and desirable objects you could exchange for otherobjects of equivalent desirability and size like the ration

tokens we used to get during the war little red ration


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tokens that were smaller than money and you needed them toget various things like meat or butter that you bought during

the war because meat was rationed and butter was rationed

things like that but there were people there in my familywho were more disillusioned with money than i w s at

that time because to me money w s like a brick a yoyoa kite and i thought i understood money

in those days it costme cents to go to the movies on saturday which is

ten cents or one dime or two nickels and a penny taxfor kids to go to the movies on saturday and it seemed

fair enough then it went to cents when it went tocents i just thought i t cost more money that something

had happened to the movie it didnt occur to me that somethinghad happened to the dime i was not in a positi n to recognize

that the dime had changed its character because the entirenature of a coinage is to deny that money changes its character

it is very important to recognize that the beauty of moneythat the great engraving and designing skills normally

employed in putt ing out money are part of a long tradition

of making money look stable of making money look likea durable thing

a nickel looks like a nickel forever it mayeventually not contribute to buying anything at all but it still

looks like a nickel the dollar looks like a dollar thoughif the dollars appearance were related to its function it would

have nearly disappeared by now having started at one sizeit would now be but a shred of itself but the image of it is

unchangednow this image of the constancy of money is very

much like the image of the constancy of language it seemsto me that there is a relationship between the solidity of

money and the solidity of the language which is verysimilar the language is also a coinage its a coinage and its

in circulation people accept it and people modify it but

all the time people have the illusion that the coinageremains the same and that theyre talking the same language

they have the illusion because the illusion is fosteredby a kind of nationalism a nation you might say is an

institution organized to stabilize credit language credit


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buying credit m ybe its the s me credit n tionhoodis form l celebr tion of the objecthood of l ngu ge ndcredit nd wh t it ttempts to do is to give the ppe r nce

of regul riz tion to hum n tr ns ctions throughout theculture

now ll over the country people re buying nd sellingthe s me or seemingly identic l things nd services nd

notions t wildly v rying prices while lmost everyone isunder the illusion th t these tr ns ctions re more or less

uniform throughout the culture bec use the n tion l systemof coin ge nd l ngu ge h s provided w y of picturing these

wildly v rying tr ns ctions th t m kes them look more or

less uniform by fr ming them within the pp rentlyregul r dimensions of our coins or our words in w y th t is

most s tisf ctory to the people who m nipul te them mostefficiently

now there were people in my f mily who couldh ve told me though they never told me very much but

they could h ve told me th t this st bility w s not likelyfirst of ll i c me from f mily where everybody spoke

sever l different l ngu ges which m kes the situ tion lookvery unst ble nyw y they spoke russi n nd germ n ndyiddish nd french nd so there we were

in my household forme to listen to convers tion usu lly me nt th t i h d to

le rn one other l ngu ge bec use kids h ve very gre tsuspicion th t somebodys s ying something th t theyre not

supposed to he r the f stest w y to get kids to le rn notherl ngu ge is to gossip in nother l ngu ge nd its m zing

how f st theyll pick it up bec use they dont w nt to beshut out from the gossip so i went through ll this

keeping up with my peoples l ngu ges nd it w s lot offun i enjoyed it ll but th t could h ve told me theres

no telling where you might h ve to go or wh t l ngu ge youmight h ve to spe k th t is s long s you dont h ve

to go nywhere nd you lw ys st nd still you never h veto t lk ny other l ngu ge bec use youre lw ys in the

s me pl ce nd everything st ys pret ty much the s me thenickel lw ys st ys the nickel we lth is lw ys we lth

leg l tender is the s me ll the me nings ttributed tothe coin ge re the s me up nd down the system but

9 1


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there weremembers of my family who distrusted this they didnt trust

money at all and there were two passions they developedpassions for land and passions for objects you see there is

something in the coinage of the language called re lestate you may laugh at the relation between real and

estate but real means thingy estate you know it isthat estate which is real and doesnt go w y it doesnt

go w y because it is like the earth the earth stays themoney well whatever happens to the money happens to

the money butthere was in this family a remote relative and

he had come the hard way here he had come from russiaafter an abortive revolution in russm m 1905 in which

hed made the mistake of turn ing a printing press he hadturned this printing press which had printed in ukrainian

various calls to arms and human dignity or whatever in thename of whatever he had called it because its not clear to me

what these manifestoes said it seems to me that when therevolutionaries went down to speak to the peasants of the

ukraine they did not make speeches to them about the rightsthe rights of man they said to them sometimes the tsar is angryat the landlords for taking away the fruits from the lands of his

people weve had enough of these scoundrelly landlordsand what we need is land for the peasants the peasants who

understood land very well and had no special ideas aboutfreedom responded rather well to this and gathered together

to help the tsar rid himself of oppressive landlords and thenfound themselves being attacked by the tsars soldiers forhaving helped the tsar rid himself of these worthless landlords

something likethat was probably in the manifestoes that were being spread

down in the south because s lenin said on some otheroccasiOn liberty is bread khleb svoboda i dont

know it doesnt sound right to me they seem a littledifferent but perhaps there is a relation and he was

calling attention to a relation as if it were an equation and it

was an effective analysis for the timehowever it wasnt effective

for my relation who was promptly put in prison whenthe revolution w s crushed with guns and swords and many of the


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peasants killed and such of their leaders and assistants sthe tsars forces could find were put in jail from which this

relative with the help of some money from his friends

and relations w s able to escape and disappear through thelatvian corridor and he had to take his ukrainian russiangerman yiddish out through latvia get into whatever boat

he could buy a passage on and go somewhere out of thetsars reach which usually meant going somewhere where

there was another relative who had gone beforeso these

refugees were likely to wind up in the united states or in cuba ormexico and this one wound up in argentina and where

before this he knew about rubles there he was in argentinadealing with argentine pesos and speaking no spanish he

quickly learned enough spanish to work in a cigar factoryand there he took his previous skills which were odd skillshe was something of an athlete he was a wrestler greco

roman style which is a form of wrestling i dont know toomuch about except that its sufficiently different from

most other kinds of wrestling that i feel i should point out that he

was a wrestler greco roman style and he was now rollingcigars in argentina while his brother who had gotten out

of russia through the latvian corridor at nearly the sametime for some reason through some connection they

had apparently collaborated in proving that bread wasfreedom this brother had somehow wound up in the united

states where he had settled in new york on second avenuethis brother was

something of an artist he had a knack for a kind of wittycaricature like painting and whimsical wood carvings and this

brother continued his politicizing for the peasants hehad come to the united states where there were no peasants

but there were workers the distinction between peasantsand workers is fairly considerable for marxist theory which

distinguishes between them rather precisely but inrevolutionary practice whoever is ready to revolt becomes a

revolutionary force and philips artist brother was familiar

with the adjustment of theory to practice so that on secondavenue he contributed his revolutionary cartoons

appropriately enough to a newspaper called ie fr ih it


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freedom which w s concerned with liber ting the workersof the g rment district or the furriers tr de from the bondsnd thr lls of the swe tshops the s me w y he h d previously

contributed them to the c useof

l nd reform nd philipsbrother who w s very witty c ric turist received cert inmount of recognition nd ccl im s newsp per rtistnd he even m de cert in mount of money t it

so he wroteto philip in rgentin who w s me nwhile working in

cig r f ctory where he w s cquiring whole new set of skillsnd underst ndings bec use in l tin meric n cig r

f ctories they did not h ve th t tot lly contemptuous rel tionshipto the people who worked there or r ther the people

who worked in these f ctories did not h ve tot lly contemptuousrel tionship to themselves nd to counter ct the boredom

of rolling nd p cking cig rs they ordin rily selected one of

the workers who h ppened to h ve p rticul rly ttr ctivere ding voice to re d loud to them while they worked

so they would h ve re d to them cerv ntes nd lope de vegnd c lderon nd quevedo nd most of wh t were considered

the m sterpiecesof

the sp nish l ngu ge long withwh tever serious modern works fell into their h nds nd seemedppropri te for re ding loud so th t fter they h d been

there while they h d he rd most of the cl ssic l liter ture ofsp in nd rgentin in this cig r f ctory where philipw s becoming very liter te in sp nish

but not we lthywhen he received ticket to the united st tes where there

w s the possibility of becoming we lthy but in englishwhich he didnt know

fortun tely for him on second venuewhen he rrived there there were m ny other people who

though they didnt spe k sp nish or even russi n spoke thelingu fr nc of most jewish emigres from middle europe

yiddish now yiddish is b sic lly rhinel nd germ nicl ngu ge th t pred tes st nd rd germ n being di lect th tw s formed in the rhinel nd in the middle ges by spe kers

who ppe r to h ve emigr ted from rom nce l ngu ge spe kingcountries p rts of wh t we now think of s fr nce nd

sp m nd this di lect s it spre d with its community of


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speakers was populated by hebrew words and then slavic andeventually technical terms from german and whatever else that

allowed it to serve as this common coinage and philip

spoke this language as he also spoke russian and polishand ukrainian and now spanish as well but with the

particular idiosyncrasy and inflection of his background andexperience that is typical of a lingua franca which is a

common coinage that is exchanged far and wide over a vastterrain by a loosely joined community of talkers who are

accustomed to making exchanges in several coinages besides theone they may happen to be talking in

which sometimes leads todifferences of opinion about the equivalences of some of

the coins they happen to be exchanging differences id oftenobserved among my relatives when they were talking

differences like the one between two relatives one had beenliving in argentina while the other had been living in the

united states for many years which didnt really impedetheir conversation because they were speaking in yiddishand not in spanish or english and they were sitting in the

living room calmly talking till one of them the americanremembered something he had forgotten to do and asked the

other to wait a moment because he had to go downstairs to attendto something in his store only it happened that he said

store as i f it was a word of yiddish ikh muss arunter insstore i have to go down to the store) the other was

puzzled vos eysst a stor (what's a store?) (where you dobusiness) vo muh treybt gesheft ohh ir meynt a bodega (ohh

you mean a bodega so that it was clear that in the yiddishof the argentine you went down to your bodega while in the

yiddish of new york you went down to your storeand it was

situations like this that should have prepared them all theserelations of mine for shifting currencies you would assume

it that they would have been prepared to handle thesecurrencies somewhat skeptically because they so often

had to change thembut these people who were so good at

exchanging languages and currencies d idnt learn the wholelesson they were so good at learning languages they


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go6 D VID N T I N

learned them so quickly that they quickly became nativesbecame natives with whatever funny accent they may have

happened to have because some though not all of them

spoke each new language with a slightly alien accent that wasa part of the old system of coinage they had so recently left

so they had whatever funny accents they had but they werealready feeling like native speakers of english because it is

one of the main functions of speaking a language at all tomake you feel like a native and to make whatever w y you

speak it seem natural and stable as it is also to make everyother w y o f speaking it strange and everyone who speaks

it strangely some sort of foreignerand these new natives of

english these relatives of mine soon felt very good in englishand at home in it s they spoke it but they still had some

distrust of their country s printed currency t the extent thatthey sensed that if they kept on accumulating this currency for

any length of time its buying power might suddenly diminishor be extinguished and to the extent they sensed this they

looked about for other things they could exchange their money

for that were in some way more valuable more durablemore real than money

and this astute greco roman wrestlercigar roller with the classical spanish education that he had

acquired in the cigar factory came to new yorks secondavenue and found employment in the fur business i think

and managed to make a fair amount of money in factconsiderably more money than his artist brother and because

he had reasonably frugal habits and nothing in particular tospend this money on he soon acquired a small pile of this

money and was soon looking about for things that were realerthan this money to exchange it for for some w y of

realizing this money making it more real than legal tenderand he had a

passion for the open air for greenery for nature and thiswas a passion he shared with many of the people living in

the grey brick buildings of second avenue and the artist

and intellectual world he traveled at the fringes of becausehe was not an artist and he didnt seem to be an intellectual

either because he was a relatively taciturn man who didnt


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D VID N T I N

spe k much to the others bout rt or politics or sp nish liter tureeven nd w s thought to be something of fool

but he was

shrewd m n nd p rsimonious the kind of m n doll rsstick to or pesos or rubles nd as he s ved his money

he observed th t these urb n rtists nd intellectu ls in theirgrey city h d dre m of n ture of things green nd fresh

nd flowering nd they found their w y somehow to thisn ture up the hudson on the old routes gw nd 7

north p st the red pple rest over the ferry t newburgh orthrough ny ck to p rt of n ture c lled sulliv n county

which was somewh t depleted form of the n ture it h donce been n oak nd beech nd chestnut forest mingled

with spruce nd hemlock nd it h d been logged out for thelumber nd then for t nb rk nd h d then gone to

f rming with pple orch rds nd d iry f rms nd mongthese f iling f rms they h d found their w y to these

sm ll things c lled bung lowsbung low i once re d poem

by p ul elu rd where he s id th t he would never use the

word bung low in poem i never thought i would use theword bung low in poem either but here it is wh t they used

to c ll bung low was flimsy wooden sh ck where too m nypeople c mped cheerfully out of love of n ture surrounded

by number of other such sh cks t the edge of bit of scrubforest

nd they founded these bung low colonies wherepeople could commune immedi tely nd directly with n ture

t the edge of this scrub forest in these little pl ceswith kitchens nd bedrooms with screens over the windows

c lled bung lows which were f irly simple to buildnd since

he was as skillful with his h nds as t cquiring money philipexch nged some of his money for l nd on which he soon built

number of these bung lowsnd he sold bung lows

bec use he h d gr nder view th n bung lows nd as these

bung lows bec me more expensive more v lu ble inexch nge he exch nged these bung lows for l nd nd

more l nd lots of l nd not m ny people w nted this l nd


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D VID N T I N

now this would never havehappened in this way except for marriage because one

brother was able to build and the other was able to decorate

but nobody was able to manage that is nobody was able todeal effectively with money as capital because while philip

could save what he mainly knew was that land was realwood was real and money well he didnt trust it too

much and the artist brother wasnt interested in moneyeither he was interested in a life of art and talk and girls

and food in the midst of nature which gave the place itstone of a socialist intellectual nudist colony up there in western

sullivan countybut it happened that the artist brother

in the course of things had an affair with one of the youngwomen who were attracted to this good life up there and this

particular young woman was not only an attractive woman butshe was also a very clever young woman and very much attracted

to the liveliness and beauty of the place so that thisaffair lasted a good deal longer than most of the affairs of theartist brother who was something of a one upman in sexual

matters and could never stay with anyone long once she hadbecome familiar and no longer an object of possible romanticintrigue so that in a way im not entirely sure about

he finally rejected her like all of the others but since shewas probably as much attracted to the place as to the man she

never stopped comingand she turned to the other brother

who was greatly surprised as you might imagine nowoman had ever looked upon him with passion or interest

unless he had moved in their direction first he was not aconventionally attractive man though he had a noble head

with a craggy dramatic face and the powerful body of theathlete he had been but he was very broad and thick and

short like a chunky guard on a professional football teamthough he was maybe a little short for a guard and what he

looked like most was a small bear and in spite of hisconsiderable classical spanish education and his russian

and german social political and economic education and hisproven ability to make money he was thought to be dumb

perhaps thiswas because he never spoke much about these things and

9 9


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9 1 D VID NTIN

when he did he spoke very slowly nd with gre t deliber tionbec use he thought while he w s spe king nd seemed to

be m king gre t effort to s y no more nd no less th n he

me nt so th t he often h d to slow down phr ses ndwords while he w s in the middle of them which resulted

in str nge distortions of emph sis nd pronunci tion th tpeople found l ugh ble or ex sper ting while they w ited

for him to get on with the convers tion so they thought hew s dumb nd he knew th t they thought so

but this youngwom n somehow m n ged to convey to him beyond hissusptcwns n tur l s they were th t she w s interestedin him nd they got m rried t which point she lost her

interest in him immedi tely but she rem ined interestedin the pl ce which she helped to build up in w y th t

w s beyond their expect tions bec use she w s even moreclever th n she w s ttr ctive nd bec use she w s ttr ctive

she helped ttr ct m le clientele nd mong th tclientele there w s one quite we lthy m n swe ter

m nuf cturer with whom she contr cted long li ison

nd bec useshe w s clever with his help she m n ged to borrow money

which she quickly invested in buildings with rooms nd morerooms in which they could put more nd more of these

cultured people who c me to v c tion in the midst of thisn ture now these buildings were not swiss ch lets or wereonly superfici lly decor ted to look like ch lets bec use this

young wom n h d no p rticul r im ge of how this n tureshould look but she h d p rticul rly good im ge of money

nd how to use it to m ke much more of it nd unlike thebrothers she knew how to borrow it nd when nd she knew

how to use it nd when to stop so th t under her m n gementthe pl ce bec me much more prosperous nd more nd more

of those people c me to sit in their c sino or d nce in it t lkin their dining h lls nd w lk in their woods while

their children sw m in the swimming pool nd pl yed onthe tennis courts nd these people ll reg rded themselves s

wh t is c lled the intelligentsi

who w s doctorhusb nd lso doctor

people like ros schillerwhod emigr ted from ustri with her

nd with her sister who lived with


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DAVID A N T I N

a small dog in an overstuffed apartment overlooking centralpark south and who w s now in her sixties and still in her

own eyes and in the eyes of her 7 year old beaus an international

beauty while rosa lived the intellectual life with herhusband in elizabeth new jersey where they had adjoiningoffices and conducted their separate practices but emerged

into a common central room a library filled with leathervolumes where they took lunch together and read the agamemnon

to each other in greek and i had seen this office whichw s in their house fronted by a greenhouse and filled with

rubber plants and her ancient black and gold instrumentsthat might have been owned by breuer or freud and i could

imagine her and her long dead husband working all morninglong and then rushing into this central study to read their greekplays and then hurrying back to treat sore throats or exammefailing eyes

and the place w s filled with people of this typeand this situation went on from year to year till the

end of the second world war after the second world wara great change took place socially what exactly it w s no

one w s clear about but all of the people who came upthere were getting older some of the older ones died and

the younger ones got older and there were fewer and fewernew ones to replace the ones that disappeared because theones who were children there now that they were grown

never came there first of all because they didnt speak theeuropean languages that gave the place a lot of its charm

and second they had no great interest in spending their timewith their elders in a place where they had been children

and had had counselors and where they knew every crack inthe tennis courts and every leak in the porch roof and

very few new ones ever heard about this place in sullivan countywhere you could hear lectures on sholem aleichem in the

morning discuss emma goldman or rosa luxembourg at lunchhear chopin ballades in the evening and dance the alexandrovsky

or the russian two step late into the night because thereservoir from which they drew these people was also

disappearing s second avenue had dispersed to great neckand new brunswick and new rochelle and though thishappened gradually the number of people coming up

II


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9 1 2 DAVID A N T I N

gr du lly diminished nd the pl ce bec me less nd lessprofit ble

t one point it h d been very profit ble which is

not to s y th t it h s lw ys been filled bec use hotels inn ture were filled only p rt of the time but every weekendit h d been filled to overflowing nd bout h lf of thesummer nd the rest of the time there h d still been enough

people left to give the sense nd provide the income forthriving business nd now less nd less of the summer w sfilled nd filled got to me n something different bec use

none of the outer buildings w s ever j mmed to c p citynymore nd they never h d to pitch tents on the l wn to

h ndle the overflow nd the business which h d been veryprofit ble bec me less nd less profit ble

but the buildingsdidn t go w y you see once youve got buildings theyre

re l youve got re l buildings the buildings re re lyouve got tennis courts the tennis courts dont go w y gr ss

grows up in them you still h ve to chlorin te the poolyouve got to rep ir the roof fter e ch winter nd rep int

the trim nd the buildings they dont go w y but thepeople m y not be there nymore nd this continues

for period of time nd it comes on b d d ys nd eventu llythe struggle to keep the hotel live just wore them out

nd the youngwom n who w s now no longer young wom n but still

clever didnt re lly underst nd this nd h d t ken to drinkingshe dr nk ch mp gne ll d y nd ll night nd the rtist

brother feeling depressed bec use this pl ce h d beenhis culture center bec use he h d m de lmost ll of his rt

works there nd there they were on the w lls of this pl ceth t w s dying this rtist brother sickened nd died nd

there w s gr nd funer l for him to which ll of the writersnd rtists who h d once g thered on second venue c me

nd hundreds of people c me to this funer l nd to fin lexhibition of his rt th t w s rr nged in g llery to p y

hom ge to ll the ye rs of his work nd he w s buried

so the intellectu l center dis ppe red

philips wife bec me sicknd just t this point

nd some people s id it w s


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D VID NTIN

bec use the rtist brother h d died nd she h d been conductingn ff ir with him ll these ye rs nd now th t he w s de d

there w s nothing in it for her nymore nd she bec mesomething of n inv lid nd no longer took ny interestin the pl ce nd it continued to run down except for

philips working on the pl ce const ntly keeping up thebuildings rep iring them bec use he believed in the physic l

pl ce the buildings nd the l ndit seemed everything

he h d he threw into the physic l pl nt he h d lw ys m demoney nd he h d m de lot of it from the pl ce so heput gre t qu ntities of it b ck into the pl ce from which he h d

gotten it nd in spite of the f ct th t it kept runningdown it w s extr ordin rily be utiful in this western corner

of sulliv n county right ne r the del w re river there w s thisstr nge europe n set of ch let like buildings to whichfewer nd fewer people c me

though ny new ones who c methere found it exotic nd colorful s i found it wheni h d occ sion to work there one summer s lifegu rd

nd you could lw ys find someone who h d pl yed chess withl sker sitting on the porch looking over endings or he rrussi n court d nce flo t down through the spruce trees to the

libr ry where you were pl ying poker with the concert pi nistnd few of the w iters

now it h ppened th t t bout thistime my wifes mother bec me the m n ger of the pl cet the time when it w s declining but still be utiful nd t

first it w s job s it h d been when she w s w itressthere in the time of its f ding glory while philips brother nd

philips wife were still live nd she h d been n ssist ntm n ger s it continued to f de nd on the de th of philips

wife she bec me the m n ger nd this job bec me somethingmore th n job it bec me p ssion te struggle to keepthe pl ce live nd restore it to its former dignity nd ffluence

in the teeth of gre t ch nges soci lly th t you couldnt stemit w s going downhill ll the w y

nd philip encour ged herin this struggle he encour ged her somewh t fin nci lly

by lending her bits of money to invest in the pl ce nd keep


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D VID NTIN

it up but even more by giving her the impression th t hewould fin lly beque the it to her bec use she lso h d love

for the pl ce for the ide of the pl ce s n institutions look while he h d love for the pl ce

sphysic l

t ngible thing nd he w nted it to be in the h nds of someonewho would t ke c re of it nd m int in it s th t thing th t

he h d known nd loved so he kept sending out sign ls toher th t she would eventu lly cquire the pl ce if she wouldonly t ke dequ te c re of it

in the me ntime there were heirswho would norm lly h ve inherited the pl ce in the

beginning hed h d son who would h ve gotten it but the

son died suddenly nd mysteriously f r w y even whilephilips wife w s still live nd then there w s sister who

should ordin rily h ve gotten the pl ce except th t she couldntkeep it up nd the pl ce w s in debt in terms of moneythere w s no v lue to the property the pl ce h d used it ll

up nd w s not only not returning money to the peoplewho h d put it in but w s now t king more money w y from

them the property h d become kind of pump th t w s

working in reverse once when it h d been set in motionby the physic l energy of its owners or the stored energy

of their money it h d pumped money out of the h nds ofof the people who were its customers into the h nds of the

people who were its owners but now it w s pumping moneyste dily out of the h nds of its owners into the h nds of its

creditors nd the people who r n it h d to sust in it withmore nd more money so th t if you got this property

wh t you got w s debt nd mortg ge with secondmortg ge in b nk nd th t me nt th t this pl ce

re l s it w s swiss ch let in the t ll spruce trees w sdebt owed to two b nks in monticello but none of them

looked t it th t w y nd in spite of the debt there w sin the f mily gre t concern over who would get the pl ce

fter philip diednd philip w s long time living

nd the hotel w s long time losing money e chtime ssisted to continue the next ye r with lo ns from

philip who lw ys found bit more money to put b ck into


26/27

it and alwaysplace then

DAVID ANTIN

just about enough to keep it alive s aphilip died

when philip died various people

who knew him and were related to him or his relativeswere invited to the funeral and philip w s about to be buriednext to his wife bessie these things are always done in

remote parts of long island they are always buried in somegreen place out in nature where they have real estate

and these places are way out there on the island and theydrove all the way out to this place after a moderately

mournful funeral moderate because he w s an old man anda cantankerous figure and not everybody loved him

and they allgot out there his sister and his wife's brothers and the

small crowd of close and not so close relatives and a few friendsand they arrived at the place where philip w s to be laid

in the grave next to bessie and bessies grave w sevacuated there w s no bessie

cries went up from variousrelatives "theyve dug up bessie " "whats happened to bessie?"

in the course of the burial no one paid any attention tophilip because everyone w s concerned with the missingbessie bessie w s gone gone bessie but the monument

over the tomb "here rests the loyal husband the loyalwife true in death s they were in life" and no bessie

only philipfor weeks this scandal w s a great mystery so

great a mystery that most of the relatives and acquaintancespaid little attention to philips will it went relatively

unnoticed that he had bequeathed the worthless hotel to hissister who w s too old to run it and trivial amounts of

money to various predictable relatives while everyone w sastonished that nothing was said in it of the whereaboutsof bessie

some people had theories they said "well shedidn t sleep with him while he w s alive he didnt want her

to sleep with him when he w s dead" but nobody could

find out they went to the cemetery people the cemeterypeople checked their records and found that in fact philip

had delegated someone to come and dig up bessie but what

915


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antin david real estate

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